Jerusalem Artichokes

A week late , but still a good day; clear sky, warm sun, and the Jerusalem Artichoke stems are blown over, the leaves dead.

Jerusalem Artichokes can be used as potatoes; fry, roast, bake, boil, mash, ... To my mind the Jerusalem Artichoke tubers are tastier than potatoes.

One by one I gently pull the stems from the ground and immediately lay the clump of soil and tubers in a tray.

The tray is carried to the soil sieve and decanted a gallon or so at a time.

A second tray collects tubers. In regular use (remediating soil) this tray collects rocks, which are then used to fill in David's Swamp.

Three such trays begin to fill the wheel barrow. By then end of this day I should have a barrow full of Jerusalem Artichoke tubers!

The plants are great producers.

This clump is about fifteen inches across; I break off tubers into my tray and carry them to the sieve.

I suspect that I still have 10% to 20% of my harvest sitting in the soil - tubers which snap off as I gently lever the stems from the ground.

If you have collected a bag of tubers from me, and if you think you would like to try growing them, I recommend that you retain one out of every twenty tubers to be planted next year. Keep the smallest tubers - they are too small to rinse properly or to dice and so on. In Bonavista I think of May 1st as the date of the last frost, and June 9th when the first artichoke shoots appear.

My harvest - five six-pound sacks and eight three-pound sacks, so 54 pounds of Jerusalem Artichoke tubers. I could eat Jerusalem Artichokes at the rate of one pound per week for a whole year.

Year of Growth 2022

This year's growth began last year. I had pulled the stems and harvested the tubers from the root ball, not realizing how many small tubers were left in the ground.

On Saturday, May 07, 2022 I wrote "As I dig over the artichoke bed, I come across a few one-inch tubers." These tubers sprouted.

On the tenth of July I panicked, and sliced four fifteen-inch gaps through the sprouted to thin them out.

By the fifteenth of July, the plants have doubled in height.

A month later, twelfth of August, the plants are six feet tall.

And by the 27th of July, some of them reach nine feet into the air. There are two species here, a plant topped with yellow sun-flower blossoms (yellow circled) and a species, much taller, without blossoms (purple circle)

The strong winds (83-90 Km/hr) of early September, a week or two before Fiona, toppled some of the stems.

Search